Fractional Identity Theft ?
by
pequod
·
about 18 years, 4 months ago
In reply to Security in the Modern Context
Fractional Identity Theft ?
( No, Silly –> It’s S.E.O. for Dummies ! )
I was asked to analyze the declining results of some websites owned by a small company in
the Southern United States.
After
building a replacement for the original and completing the usual
metrics, I began to map the distribution of the client’s unique strings
on the net.
I discovered entire pages from several sites in the
client’s domain had been replicated on websites operated by “other
entities” registered in several foreign countries.
Additionally, participation in web based political forums by the registrant was discovered
(in 2 languages) – originating from two non-North American Countries.
I described these findings to the site owner as an apparent attempt to
craft webpages to exploit the process by which search engines compile
the result snippets seen by users.
( As snippets were
constructed in those days, in some cases, clicking on the “manipulated”
link would lead a user to an untended page. ) Google’s , Yahoo’s, and
other spider cached data helped clarify the evolution of the ‘exploit’.
The distribution of this ‘exploit’ seems limited to a single
non-US actor with (30) Websites and one
Major Hollywood Movie
promotional affiliation !
To
obviate the clever cloaking menace, I’m coding a crawler for the
purpose of monitoring the (un)usual suspects for combinations of
crafted pages and meta tags that may result in such infringement.
…
I. I. Rabi comes to mind:
“We Drove Traffic to your Website, what more would you want ?
The Face on Mars ?”
